Because Beauty Must Be Edited.

📖When I Hold Your Hand, The Snow Melts_Jang Suyoung Poetry Collection

I read the poems feeling like I was peeking into a diary.

Usually, at the end of a poetry collection, there’s an enigmatic and stylish critic’s commentary, but this collection had no special commentary.

I had to digest the poems entirely on my own.

Reading a poetry collection without hints is thrilling in many ways.

It might seem like a feast of random words, but a line of poetry, curling its claws with an innocent face, occasionally leaps out and scratches my heart.

No doubt, meaning will continue to grow within the wounds.

📝 Thoughts and Sentences I Loved

pg.46

Duck. What diary did you write yesterday?

The things I just said.

But no one will be able to check my notes.

The condition is bad.

**

Remember Sunday?

You told me on the phone that the calendar was sparkling too much.

That’s a matter of the future.

Sunday is at the end

and also at the beginning.

That’s what I have to say.

pg.60

I liked whispers

simply because lips were close to ears.

pg.65

The nuance of ‘parang’ faded, becoming a spring in a fable that no one reads.

pg.74

The sentences I wrote about you shattered hundreds of millions of times. Do they not need to shatter anymore? But you know, it doesn’t matter if they shatter. The fragments, which are nothing, merely claim to be you.

Meaning will continue to grow.

pg.78

I don’t want to see whose head the swaying ponytail on the street is attached to. Sticking my neck out of the cafe window, it’s just singers chirping that women wear blouses to work and men wear dress shirts to work. They are someone’s beloved. My mom taught me that’s power. It’s pronounced similarly to the word ‘gyeolryeon’ I saw in an American novel, and smoke is coming out, it won’t stop.

pg.82

I merely hung up the phone, so why do you act as if I’ve shaken off your wrist? Something stands fiercely on those wrists I’ve never once offered. According to you, it must be fate, or fortune, or sinews, or a trap. Look closely yourself, do you need to exert yourself polyphonically? Why are you doing this? What are you waiting for? You are already here, and the crow stands beside you forever, everyone has their own crow, so why do you keep telling me to wait for you?

**

pg.85

Thank you. I’m here as much as I can be.

And I went far away.

He was behind me, sinking small, cold definitions of men one by one into the sea. Like a birthday. Like champagne in the stomach. I tried to say he was eternal, but love did not fully bloom. Nothing dared to disappear as white as snow. It was a common occurrence.

pg.87

I don’t want to become unfamiliar.

My friend says.

**

Don’t make it new.

We say.

**

At some point, everyone

will live within a manageable net.

We are individuals,

because beauty must be edited.

**

There’s nothing that deserves to be forgotten.

Nor any fitting harmony.

**

If anything can be a first,

I hope your world and mine continue.

**

With the nuance of love.

**

It’s okay if the next picture is drawn a little slower.

pg.90

If my daily life were the sea, there was anxiety corresponding to the sand. So I always wanted to be happy. I wanted to insert an edited version, similar to my life, into a video machine and play it.

pg.92

A past month floats by.

As if it has something to say.

Like someone you can see anywhere.

**

Promises look down at us from a tree, never come down, and fly away.

**

pg.110

Time is always given the name of an emotion, and you hang in the sky, like eyes I saw long ago, shimmering forever. If I ask if you’re sad, you answer that you flow away and can’t be seen. When it gets cold, you disappear, and reappear around the time it freezes. Trains forming bands, melting evenly across the ground from the moment eyes open at the signal of dawn. Love is a giant crosswalk that formed between you and a friend who said that only blinking is eternal in this world.

**

pg.116

I wore a bed. I walk around. My expression is a pillow.

I met someone who wants me. They say they’ll lie and tell me they love me every time they meet me from now on.

Please go out with me.

Cherry blossoms are promiscuous flowers,

said the grandfather who likes Hwatu. He sneezed repeatedly in front of me.

I did the laundry. For a long time.

**

I held a pen. I threw away the pen. I dreamed of the pen chasing me. I asked the sentence to save me from the pen.

**

Grandfather starts claiming again that watermelon is a lewd fruit.

I went out after dyeing my fingernails with maple leaf color and met fate.

I am fated.